Adrienne Snelling: Reflections of an artful eye

Such was the case with Lehigh Valley photographer and supporter of the arts Adrienne Snelling, who began taking snapshots with a Kodak Brownie camera as a young girl, but only got into serious photography when she was nearly 50.

Snelling died in March at age 81. She was suffering from Alzheimer's when her husband, Lehigh Valley entrepreneur and political activist Charles Snelling, gave her a lethal cocktail of drugs and then took his own life. But an artist's work transcends death, and the photo exhibit "In Memory of Adrienne Snelling," on display at the Baum School of Art through Nov. 16, celebrates her life in photography with 18 black- and-white images of her family and her travels.

The exhibition is presented as part of Lehigh Valley Photography Month and the Olympus InVision Photo Festival presented by ArtsQuest.

Snelling began her serious photography in 1978, the year she won a Kodak International Newspaper Photography Award. From that time on, she also focused her talents on more than just a camera's viewfinder. A founding member of Allentown Art Museum's Society of the Arts (SOTA), Snelling also served on the board of trustees for the Baum School of Art, the advisory board of the former Open Space Gallery in Allentown and as a member of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Although Snelling had numerous exhibitions from 1978 to 2008, the year 2000 proved to be special for her. Not only was her work featured in a one-person show at the Baum School and in the group exhibit "My People, My Family," organized by the Baum School, but she also won an Arts Ovation Award for outstanding services and contributions to the arts from the Allentown Arts Commission.

The square image size of the majority of photographs in the show suggests most were taken with a medium-format camera, giving them an old-fashioned look, perhaps intentionally reverting back to that original Kodak Brownie. Eleven are of Snelling's own children or grandchildren (the couple had five children and 11 grandchildren), or of their young friends.

Informal portraiture is an elusive art. For every truly provocative image, many seem more at home in a family photo album than on a museum's walls. This show has its share of both.

"Meredith," a portrait of a young girl in a star-spangled bathing suit sitting on a staircase, is unquestionably a gem. The image immediately evokes Diane Arbus' photographs of the bizarre and marginal, with the subject's oddly proportioned shoulders, truncated neck and uncomfortably precocious gaze. The pattern on her bathing suit, which should conflict with the busy graphics on the carpeting on the stairs, inexplicably seems to complement it.

In "Henry," a young boy in front of a piano stares directly at us with a look of pleasant inquisition. It's a wonderfully engaging photo that just begs for a dialogue with the subject. We know he's a Phillies fan from his sweatshirt, we know what time the photograph was taken from the clock, presumably working, behind him. But has he just finished a music lesson? Did he choose to stand there, or did Snelling pose him there because she liked the soft light?

Other photos simply don't work as well. A young man standing, with arms crossed, on a rooftop with a familiar New York City landscape behind him feels like a snapshot. Images of "Elizabeth" tell us little more than she's an attractive, young woman clearly at ease with the photographer.

But then there's Snelling's powerfully confrontational portrait of "Matthew," a young shirtless boy, thumbs hooked into his pockets, backed up against a wall.

Snelling traveled extensively in Europe, and she photographed scenes such as the town square in Siena, the Uffizi as seen from the Arno River in Florence, and a bike rental shop in Rome. Many of these landscape photographs appear in the show. There's one of a wooded park scene in Paris which at first seems quite ordinary, but on closer inspection reveals the iconic subject of Snelling's interest — two lovers embracing on a park bench.

The fact that some of these photos might look more at home in a family photo album is not any indictment to Snelling's art, but a testament to her honesty. In reflecting on her motivations and objectives, she once wrote, "I really have done my work in photography for myself, but it has always pleased me when my work has found favor with my viewers."